The presidential election is two months from today, and as I type this sentence fivethirtyeight.com gives Donald Trump a 31.2 percent chance of becoming the next occupant of the White House to Billary Clinton’s 68.8 percent chance.

That’s about a one-in-three chance for El Trumpo, which is still too close for comfort for me.

How can fivethirtyeight.com give Billary a bit more than a two-thirds chance of winning the White House when nationwide she’s polling no more than around two to five percentage points ahead of Trump? That would be due to the states where she’s leading and how many electoral votes they have. Right now fivethirtyeight.com projects that Billary is likely to win more than 300 electoral votes (she or Trump needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House).

Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives Billary a 99.6 percent chance of winning my state of California — and thus all 55 of its electoral votes, which is more than any other state’s — so it will be quite safe for me to vote my conscience and thus to vote for Jill Stein.

If the probability between Trump and Billary is too close for comfort in your state and you want to prevent a President Trump by voting for Billary, I can’t be mad at you for that, but if, like I do, you live in a solidly blue or solidly red state where it’s pretty fucking foreordained that Billary or Trump is going to win the state — say, by more than a 75 percent or 80 percent chance — and you don’t want to vote for Billary or for Trump, then I encourage you not to.

Take Texas, for instance. Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives Trump a 91.6 percent chance of winning Texas. Sure, you could vote for Billary if you’re a Texan voter, but she’s not going to win Texas and thus she won’t win any of its electoral votes in the winner-takes-all Electoral College system, so you might as well vote for another candidate if you don’t want to vote for Billary or for Trump. You might as well cast a protest vote, as I am doing.

Like California, Billary is going to win New York; fivethirtyeight.com puts that at a 98.6 percent chance. If you’re a New York resident who doesn’t want to vote for Billary, then don’t. She’s going to win your state and all of its electoral votes anyway. Go ahead and make that protest vote; you’re quite safe in doing so.

It all comes down to which candidate reaches 270 electoral votes (270 is the majority of the total of 538 electoral votes possible, from where Nate Silver’s website fivethirtyeight.com takes its name), so if you live and vote in a state that actually could make a difference in the outcome of the presidential election, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota or Nevada, then by all means hold your nose and vote for Billary.

It’s funny (pathetic funny, not ha-ha funny), because it doesn’t matter which candidate wins; he or she most likely will start off on Inauguration Day disliked by a majority of the American people.

Our “choice” in this presidential election is bullshit, and that fact contributes to why I’m voting for Jill Stein, even if it amounts to a protest vote.

I wrote “our ‘choice,'” in the preceding paragraph, but we, the American people, should have choices,not just the choice between only two candidates. Voting for a third-party or independent presidential candidate is a way to say Oh, hell no! to the partisan duopoly of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party (can’t tell the difference between the two? Yeah, most of the rest of us can’t, either), which has devolved to our “choice” of Billary Clinton or Donald Trump.*

As I noted, even a 31.2 percent chance of Trump becoming president (where it stands right now) is too close for my comfort, but I’m not sure at which point (if at any point) I’d give Billary any money to help her defeat Trump. I’ve yet to give her a penny, as I don’t want her to be president, but I want Trump to be president even less.

Trump strikes me as a dangerous demagogue whose fascist presidency could bring harm to millions of people here at home and abroad, and should he actually win the White House and I had done nothing at all to try to prevent that, I probably would regret it.

(The only thing that I really could do to help prevent a President Trump, given the restrictions on my free time and energy [and given the fact that no, I won’t make phone calls to voters in other states, as I hate receiving political phone calls myself], is to give Billary money; she doesn’t need my vote, since she essentially has won my state already.)

Johnson, I surmise, is siphoning more votes from Trump than from Billary — the Libertarians (and Perot was Libertarian-ish) aren’t centrist but are right of center — but, I surmise, not to the point that Ross Perot siphoned votes from George H. W. Bush.

If Billary wins the White House, she most likely won’t do it with even 50.0 percent of the popular vote, and she’ll be weak from Day One.

That list of 11 states mostly coincides with fivethirtyeight.com’s list of “tipping-point” states above.

For the most part, I’d say that if your state appears on either list (most of the states cited appear on both lists), you probably strongly should consider voting for Billary (while holding your nose after having taken an anti-emetic, if necessary) in order to block Trump.

I’m not voting for Billary because my not voting for her won’t help Trump at all. (If you actually believe that the U.S. president is chosen by the popular vote, please educate yourself on the Electoral College.)

And I still maintain that Bernie Sanders was the stronger of the two Democratic candidates to go up against Trump, and that the Democratic Party made a big fucking mistake by making Billary its nominee.

Of course, I don’t blame the primary voters and caucus-goers entirely for that; there was, after all, a lot of corruption within the calcified, obsolete Democratic National Committee to ensure that Billary won the pageant.